1) We are obviously aware of XMPP, having been developing client-side interfaces to it for years.
2) We started this project in 2001 - around the same time Jabber was in its infancy - and as smacktoward notes, the main reason we're not using XMPP today is inertia. XMPP is great, but XML just isn't our personal preference.
We figure being more open with our protocol can't be a bad thing and so it's out there for folks to pick apart and send us feedback, which we'd love! Alot of our protocol was built with an eye towards XMPP federation as well; I actually had Trillian interoperating with Google Talk one afternoon but it seems like that ship may have sailed. :-\
Jabber core protocol (XMPP) is kinda like SMTP. It deals with transmission of messages between two peers. Just like with SMTP, you can federate servers, so they can exchange messages between each other.
And the similarities don't end here. XMPP doesn't have built-in support for encryption (apart from the basic TLS encryption for the transport layer), it doesn't have support for message archiving and chat history syncing, there is no support for group chats, and so on.
A lot of this functionality is added as extensions (e.g. group chats are XEP-045), but this simply caused a lot of fragmentation in the ecosystem. So you could never rely on your client (or server) interoperating with other clients properly.
Audio calls and video also never really worked well. Google tried to push them by releasing libjingle in 2006 (!!!) but it was kinda ignored by everyone.
Jabber is now XMPP which is a hugely used platform all over the internet for many many purposes including web and in-app messaging. It is fully interoperable between domains (if the server allows it).
I used FB Messenger over XMPP for the last handful of years before it was shut down using Pidgin and I'm pretty sure that's how it worked. You could talk to people on different networks but you needed your own FB account to talk on Messenger and you couldn't do group chats cross-network.
GTalk and self-hosted XMPP could federate and you only needed one account and conversations could span servers.
XMPP/Jabber itself is not a bad idea at all. As well as federation. Companies who sabotage XMPP federation by not adopting it (M$, Yahoo, AOL etc), or backing off from it (Google) or proliferating new incompatible junk (Whatsapp and other monstrosities) are a bad thing.
For whatever reason I kind of remember Gaim/Adium/Pidgin/libpurple had a run of security issues back in the day too.. I assume that stuff got fixed up by now... but I think at the time that accounted for its decline. Oh, now that I think of it wasn't XMPP (streaming XML) originally invented for Jabber which Pidgin supported?
Yes, at one point I ran my own prosody jabber/xmpp server and regularly chatted through it with friends who were gchat users. Even had presence (idle , busy, etc) support! It worked amazingly.
First they killed federation, then they killed xmpp support entirely.
Mostly correct but it does not use Jabber/XMPP, it uses a set of procotols like Webfinger (account resource discovery), Atom/ActivityStreams, Salmon (remote account notifications) and PubSubHubbub (follower update notifications)
- XMPP clients usually suck in that area, in my opinion.
what do you use for irc? at least irssi and adium do irc and xmpp, i'm sure others do too.
If someone with high profile (GTalk? Facebook Chat?) would build a product based on this protocol, it would boost the adoption tremendously. On the other hand, as I stated a couple of days earlier in another XMPP discussion: As long as Google or Facebook are not supporting federation, they are not really supporting the core feature of XMPP in my book.
huh? google chat does have xmpp federation. i run my own jabber server and talk to a bunch of people that use google chat through the web interface or a jabber client.
It's XMPP at core, but - AFAIK - they also do not support server-to-server federation. So you can connect to Facebook chat with any XMPP compatible client, but if you run your own ejabberd server, you can't connect to your server, and then message your Facebook friends.
Trillian is basically the same as Pidgin, one client implementing multiple incompatible protocols.
Jabber is the originator of XMPP.
Insanely both Google and Facebook used XMPP for a while, but then turned off federation (allowing someone on Facebook to message someone on Google).
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